Leeds completes 'painless' Windows XP upgrade

Leeds City Council has saved taxpayers' money and minimised disruption by using an automated software auditing tool to ease a major Microsoft Windows IT upgrade.

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The mammoth task of migrating the council's staff of more than 12,000 laptop and PC users to Windows XP was streamlined using Centennial Discovery (CD).

Manually auditing the software used on every machine ahead of the upgrade would have taken the council months, interrupted council services and could have meant the data would be out of date before the audit was completed.

CD provided a comprehensive automated auditing tool that gave the council - one of the largest government bodies in the UK - a speedy snapshot of the software on every machine.

Leeds has been working with Centennial Software since 2004 and has now completed its upgrade to Windows XP.

Philip Wright, configuration manager at the council, estimates the Centennial software is helping the council save about £75,000 per year.

He said: "Discovery provided visibility of assets we were not previously aware of and as a result enabled us to feel entirely in control of the migration."

The council now also has complete visibility of its IT estate, enabling Wright to budget for and carry out software asset management in a much more efficient manner and to monitor its software licensing.

Wright said: "It gives us complete visibility of all our IT assets on our network. It enables us to plan and schedule software upgrades and identifies whether we have performed them satisfactorily. It must be freeing up thousands of hours for our desktop PCs and servers. If a site goes down, it also allows us to look at what users it will impact and put contingency plans in place."

The council is also using Centennial software for its managed service process, which will include both asset management and rolling kit refresh programmes, allowing Wright's department to provide further IT facilities to other council departments.